Derbyshire Dales District Council new website goes live

Mar 06, 2012

We have provided all the development work for the new site (www.derbyshiredales.gov.uk), with Tor Studio doing the design work. The project has been turned around within a very tight timescale. There was a lot of content to migrate from their old system and staff members needed to be trained to help contribute to the review and migration process. Couple this with a complete re-working of the site structure, some fairly proscriptive guidelines for local authority websites, and the release of a radically new version of the CMS mid-way through the project, and we all had our work cut out!
We made it though, and even got our pictures in the paper to prove it!
Joomla was used to power the content management for the site. Although not without its faults, it is great at managing larger sites like this one and provides a better user experience for editors and staff than some (very expensive) commercial alternatives. Two neighbouring councils are also using Joomla and they are benefitting from sharing expertise and resources. We have started work with Erewash Borough Council on a similar project, which will be launched in the next couple of months.